The August 2011 show is about the Byzantine Rite of the Catholic Church. We talk with St. Mary’s parishioner, Jan Rack, a convert to Catholicism who has a great love of the Byzantine liturgy.

Within our Church there are seven Canonical rites of equal dignity, descendants of the liturgical practices that originated in centers of Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria. One of these rites is the Byzantine rite which is the largest of the Eastern rites. The Byzantine liturgy was developed by St. James but modified by Sts. Basil and John Chrysostom. After the schism between Rome and Constantinople, many churches remained separated from Rome. After these churches returned to the fold, they have generally been treated as separate rites based on their particular location. Churches using the Byzantine liturgy include the Albanian, Belarussian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Italo-Albanian, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, and Ukrainian.